Will the real protagonist please stand up?

Apr28

New guest blogger NUTS4R2 looks at the archetypal heroes of classic fiction.

There
are certain questions which plague my mind in the small hours of the night. The
otherworldly realm between sleep and the alarm clock when one desperately needs
to return to darkness but the forward motion of the brain makes it
impossible... giving one’s face a corpse’s pallor and stubbornly rendering
one’s waking hours of gainful employment something akin to the slow shuffle of
a zombie through a graveyard. The sleepless voids in which man’s darkest
questions are unleashed often bring up enquiries which I find myself unable to
answer and so, this possibly semi regular post may be the place where I stir
certain questions around in my brain and see if I can come up with an outcome
which, at the very least, makes some sense to me.

This week my waking thoughts were of the difference between archetypes of main
protagonists or, for want of a less buzzworthy term... heroes. Are the literary
types of men and women who populate the fictional adventures of such titans as
Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, William Hope Hodgson, George Lucas,
Kenneth Robeson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dennis Wheatley or Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, to name a few, all made of the same stuff... asides from the ‘right stuff’?
Are there similarities between them which might be called upon as examples of
the ‘ingredients’ of a character of good standing? Are there rules and, indeed,
if there are rules... would they be of a deliberate conformity or are they just
manifestations of only a few routes the human mind can conceive to bring a
certain kind of character together in as credible a manner as possible if a
writer or director, say, were wanting to bring home the bacon and survive off
them?

Now, I’m not going to go all Joseph Campbell on you here, I reckon. I’ve never
read The Hero With A Thousand Faces (don’t worry... it’s on my hit list of
future reads) but I’m not concerned here with the hero’s journey as much as I
am with identifying the different versions that these literary or cinematic (or
a thrilling combination of the two) protectors of a certain kind of justice
have manifested themselves in over the years. I reckon I can boil it down to
two main types of hero and both of each type can be seen to have different reactions
and outcomes to the kinds of adventures they might find themselves in. The
first of my two types would rarely, unless being written about in the form of a
parody or post-modern extension of a specific character, cross paths with the
‘enhanced world’ of the second type of hero in anything other than possibly
making an appearance in the realm inhabited by that second type.

Okay.. so, I’m going to use examples of those authors and creators I’ve used
above to demonstrate how I can split the classic hero into two distinct
sub-types.

The first type, that which I often refer to as the Scooby Doo hero, is the
rigid man of science. He is an expert, highly competent in his specific field
or is someone less knowledgeable but firmly entrenched in the scientific world.
Everything within his adventure will make absolutely perfect sense, even if it
doesn’t at first appear to be the case, with the caveat that such explanations
given to render any pursuit of the supernatural would be limited to the
speculative science of the era in which he is being written... as opposed to
the era in which he is set. If a specific story is set in the past, for
example... in which case hindsight might come into play if a character is set
in, say, the 1930s but is being written about with the scientific knowledge of
a writer from contemporary times.

These kinds of heroes can be found in persons such as both of Arthur Conan
Doyle’s two characters Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger, who are men of
rigid science, even though Challenger’s adventures tend to cross paths with the
worlds of fantasy to some extent. Such heros can also be found quite a lot
within the literature of Jules Verne, who has a whole host of these rigid men
of science who are able to explain away the kinds of fantastical phenomena they
tend to stumble on or create involvement with. Even Barbicane, the hero of
Verne’s speculative science fiction story From The Earth To The Moon, is able
to rigidly explain everything he witnesses on his journey to something within
the realm of pure scientific reasoning. Ditto for the aforementioned Professor
Challenger, who is able to explain away dinosaurs and other strange phenomena
well within the boundaries of science, even if such a thing is beyond the
realms of possibility... certainly looking from today’s end of the telescope.
Heck... even the strange creatures that inhabit Barsoom (Mars) in Edgar Rice
Burroughs Martian tales, often but not always headed up by the hero John
Carter, are pursued by their protagonists with the, admittedly highly
speculative, scientific backdrop required to enable such fantasies to exist as
something that... COULD happen (couldn’t they?). Certainly, in 1912 when the
first tale, Under The Moons Of Mars (later changed to the more familiar A
Princess Of Mars) was written, there would surely have been more leverage in
the words of the writer than would be given pause for plausibility these days.
And the seeming super powers of the early books’ heroic John Carter are a
phenomena which exists because his Earth muscles are used to a much larger pull
of gravity on is own planet and he is less hampered on Mars (which was the same
explanation with Siegle and Shuster’s iconic superhero Superman on his debut in
1938).

A good example where the seemingly supernatural mystery is revealed to be
anything but by a science hero is also the story which is largely recognised as
being the first modern detective tale. Written in 1841, Edgar Allan Poe’s 'The
Murders In The Rue Morgue' was the first of three stories to highlight the
exploits of C. Auguste Dupin (the other two being 'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt'
and 'The Purloined Letter'). In his first tale, Dupin’s reasoning mind make short
work of a plot involving a locked room mystery and rules out any supernatural
invention in the solving of ghastly murder at its heart. I won’t reveal the
solution here but Poe’s creation, perhaps underused by the great writer
himself, was extremely influential and was a direct influence on a lot of
literary detectives in his wake... including a special mention in the first of
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, the 1866 story A Study In
Scarlet.

Perhaps the best example, purely from taking part in well over 200 adventures,
most of them written by Lester Dent under the Street & Smith publishing
company’s pen name Kenneth Robeson, is the character who was often marketed
quite clearly as a ‘science detective’... Doc Savage. He, like all the other
heros of scientific reasoning, is a full on practitioner of the Scooby Doo Man
Of Mystery in that, more so than the others, the plots of the pulps he and his
colleagues were inhabiting were deliberately fantastical and often under the
guise of some manifestation of supernatural or alien phenomena. But fear not,
just as the kids in the old Scooby Doo Where Are You? cartoon (and the majority
of the later incarnations of the show) would pull the mask from the seemingly
supernatural monster to reveal a bland and embittered human who had managed to
wreak havoc with the surprisingly casual appliance of some costly science... so
too would Doc Savage, The Man Of Bronze, lift the lid on assorted werewolfery,
eye popping death, goblins, sea monsters and various other manifestations of
what you might call the ‘supernatural’ world and demonstrate that everything was
down to the invention of a living, breathing, human villain as opposed to what
the rest of the protagonists in the story would take at their ghostly face
value.

So there you go... men of science.

But there’s also the OTHER kind of hero too...

The men who have either a good working knowledge of, or at least an open mind
to, what I shall call... for the sake of argument... the supernatural world.
These people are often equipped with the knowledge that will allow them to beat
their otherworldly foes and will, quite often, pursue them with the exact same
passion as the ‘scientific hero’ I’ve just been talking about.

So we have characters like Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing... pursuing Dracula and
saving lives with all the knowledge of the creatures known as vampires at his
disposal. We have William Hope Hodgson's Carnaki, the enemy of the haunted world
of invading spirits, battling the forces of darkness with the tools of his
trade and resorting to the same kinds of symbols and rituals, dressed up as
almost scientific fact, in much the same way that his spiritual inheritor,
Dennis Wheatley’s Duc de Richleau, does in his very own supernatural adventure,
The Devil Rides Out.

Like George Lucas’ character Luke Skywalker, who is inhabiting a world of hard
science which has a supernatural element in the very practical spiritual
dimension known as The Force, these characters pursue their worlds as doggedly
as a scientist, even though they are using skills or special powers that
actually have no credence, really, in the world of scientific phenomena, by any
stretch of the imagination.

And so, my conclusion is that these two types are pretty much the same two
kinds of heroes you get throughout art and literature to this day... and it’s
hard to imagine anything different. In some ways, the second of the two kinds,
who I shall now dub ‘The Supernatural Warrior’, are much more suited to
negotiate pretty much any form of literary domain than ‘The Scientific Heroes’
are credibly able to do. If a science hero found him or herself suddenly thrust
into a world inhabited by spiritual antagonists, for example, and they could
find no explanation within the realm of their own scientific knowledge and
reasoning. They are left defenceless against such lurking menaces, just like
the non-heroic protagonist of an H. P. Lovecraft story, where a main character
is as likely to slip into the dark embrace of madness as cut to the heart of
the mystery before him.

As if to, almost, prove a point... in the very last of the original run of Doc
Savage novels, which were first published as pulp magazines in a ‘one novel a
month’ format, we have the final tale, Up From Earth’s Centre. In this tale, we
have the only time that Doc Savage meets a phenomenon which he can’t explain
away with science. The story tells of Doc Savage’s descent into, what appears
to be and is never proven as anything else, the very depths of Hell. He, of
course, escapes with his life intact but has absolutely no explanation for the
weird and inexplicable events of this adventure. For once, Doc is at a loss
and, as if the science hero once disproven was deemed spent by the powers that
be, the magazine was promptly cancelled. My own, personal theory is that Lester
Dent, on finding that the publication that had been providing him a living (and
which he had been writing, with a few months off, at the rate of one novel a
month from 1933 to 1949) was about to be cancelled, deliberately wrote an open
ended story that would not be solved until a subsequent ‘return trip to hell’
was forthcoming in a later issue. Perhaps he thought he could get enough
readers writing in and demanding a scientific solution to the mystery to keep
the, once very popular character, afloat for another year or two? Who knows? It
makes an interesting ending, though, for a character who was always the
ultimate science hero to be finally confounded by the kind of mystery that was
his bread and butter for so long and that, in the end, the world of the
supernatural proved to be too much for him.

If he had been guest starring in another character’s story, however, things may
have seemed a little more hopeful...

The writing in such tales can be such that the scientific hero can make a good
‘straight man turned stooge’ for The Supernatural Warrior, in that they can
enrich the story with a contrary notion which can be contradicted to explain to
the reader or viewer the true, to the fantasy realm, state of affairs of the
fantastic monster which is probably lurking at the heart of the story to jump
out at you. It can work the other way around too but, when the tables are
turned, the revelation is often less satisfying and The Supernatural Warrior
can also be as helpful and ready to ‘pitch in’ with his ‘real world skills’ as
any other character. So the punchline, as it were, is rather spoiled, I feel,
in situations such as this. In other words, when The Science Hero is also a
fish out of water, things can get quite distraught and dramatic for them.

That being said, I have a soft spot for both of these types of main
protagonist, even if they suddenly find them thrust into the role of ‘Helpful
Companion’ by the confines of the plot in these kinds of tales. I can enjoy all
my heroes responsibly and with a sound mind that the various worlds they
inhabit can constitute a pleasant post-modern melange in the mind of the reader.
Always a good thing, I reckon.

However, now that my main type of heroic figures are thusly categorised, I now
have the equally large problem of enquiring into the nature of such companions,
sweethearts and villains that the average heroic traveller of either category
may find themselves encumbered with in the course of their adventures. I also
have to ask myself why so many of the adventurers carrying forward these
internal struggles seem to be so alone when it comes to the opportunity of
romantic companionship, which seems to be a pretty common factor, it has to be
said. Perhaps, though, these are questions best left unanswered until another
sleepless night comes upon me.